In January of 2020, the first news reports of a dangerous, but regionally restricted novel virus named SARS-COV-2 (henceforth may be referred to as COVID-19) began to circulate in the mainstream western media. At that point, little could anyone know that the next year and a half would see that virus grow into a worldwide pandemic unlike any the world has ever experienced. Thousands of deaths, shutdowns of economic activity, and harsh quarantine were among many of the changes to society and life as we once knew them that people had to adjust to rapidly. The planetary paradigm shifted to a “new normal”. These rapid changes took a major toll on the mental health of large numbers of people around the world.

I first conducted a literature review on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the mental health of various populations in the U.S. and Worldwide. I selected literature that examined the mental health trends of two important populations for my study: the general public, with no previous diagnosis of mental illness, and those who had such a diagnosis. The literature revealed important trends in regard to these populations.

First, the general population has faced staggering levels of (health) anxiety during this pandemic, largely on account of mass panic surrounding transmission rates. Many people in the general population have not been able to care for their loved ones that have been infected due to forced contact restrictions and quarantine requirements. Quarantine can lead people to extreme levels of boredom, colloquially referred to as “going stir crazy” or “having cabin fever.” Fears of contracting the virus also lead to economic shortages as people panic buy massive quantities of goods such as toilet paper, making these necessities difficult to find for many people in the general population. Social life has seen many changes as well due to lockdown policies. As more people spend more time at home, any strained family relationships have the potential to become even more strained.

Physical distancing from friends is often to blame for this. One can argue that nowhere is physical distance more apparent than in the world of “Zoom school,” a pedagogical model many learning institutions have had to take during the pandemic. College students have faced many challenges during this time as well. Many have lost internships or faced some other major disruption to their academic and professional careers. Completing semesters remotely was challenging for many students, and this placed a great deal of stress on them. College students already had disproportionately high rates of anxiety and depression, and the pandemic exacerbated this problem to a previously unseen degree. Lockdown and the stress of the pandemic increased comorbidity for many mental health conditions. Isolation worsened feelings of loneliness nationwide by physically distancing people from each other. People became sadder, more fearful, and lonelier in the pandemic

The Macalester population largely followed these trends. I sampled 30 Macalester students to gauge the mental health impacts of the pandemic within the college community.

23.3% of the sample consisted of first-years, 13.3% sophomores, 40% juniors, and 23.3% seniors. 33.3% identified as male, 63.3% identified as female, and the remaining participants identified as some other gender (3.3%). 76.7% identified as white, 6.7% identified as Black/African American, 10% identified as Asian, and the remaining 6.7% identified as some other race. This sample is largely representative of the Macalester student population as a whole.

About half of the respondents had some preexisting mental health diagnosis or condition.

Each of them had done some amount of remote schooling during the pandemic. 73.3% found that online schooling is more difficult than in-person school, 20% found that the difficulty was about the same between the two, and 6.7% found online schooling to be easier. Overall, the majority found remote schooling to be more difficult than traditional in-person schooling.

Next, I asked a series of Likert scale questions.

How do the Macalester students stack up against trends found in the literature review? Surprisingly, much of the sample didn’t feel that the pandemic strained relationships with friends or family, unlike much of the consensus from the literature review. Nor did the sampled students strongly feel that the pandemic had disrupted their academic and/or professional plans. Perhaps this is due to support found at the college such as the internship programs offered through the Career Exploration Center. While Macalester College as an institution has done much to keep students on track, their efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic on the mental health of students have been lackluster at best, performative at worst, and largely ineffective. For example, the “Wellness Days” where classes were canceled sounded effective on paper, but ended up being ineffective due to the massive amount of schoolwork due immediately after by virtue of the breakneck pace of the module system implemented for the 2020-2021 school year. The pandemic has resulted in a Macalester student body that is sadder, lonelier, and more anxious. What is needed is not band-aid fixes like “Wellness days”; but rather a combination of top-down administration-led and, perhaps more importantly, bottom-up student-led programs and events to foster a stronger sense of community. Macalester is a microcosm of the broader society, so one would expect to see similar trends in the social impacts of the pandemic as in society writ large. However, Macalester serves as a compelling case study for the specific mental health challenges levied by COVID-19, while also allowing one to imagine possible solutions to the problems.

Alradhawi, M., Shubber, N., Sheppard, J., & Ali, Y. (2020). Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental well-being amongst individuals in society- a letter to the editor on “the socio-economic implications of the coronavirus and covid-19 pandemic: A review.” International Journal of Surgery, 78, 147–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsu.2020.04.070

Brooks, S. K., Webster, R. K., Smith, L. E., Woodland, L., Wessely, S., Greenberg, N., & Rubin, G. J. (2020). The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: Rapid review of the evidence. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3532534

Crayne, M. P. (2020). The traumatic impact of job loss and job search in the aftermath of covid-19. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 12(S1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000852

Fernandes, N. (2020). Economic effects of coronavirus outbreak (covid-19) on the World Economy. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3557504

Fitzpatrick, K. M., Harris, C., & Drawve, G. (2020). Fear of covid-19 and the Mental Health Consequences in America. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 12(S1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000924

Gavin, B., Lyne, J., & McNicholas, F. (2020). Mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 37(3), 156–158. https://doi.org/10.1017/ipm.2020.72

Golberstein, E., Wen, H., & Miller, B. F. (2020). Coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) and Mental Health for Children and Adolescents. JAMA Pediatrics, 174(9), 819. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.1456

Kumar, A., & Nayar, K. R. (2020). Covid 19 and its mental health consequences. Journal of Mental Health, 30(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2020.1757052

Lee, J., Solomon, M., Stead, T., Kwon, B., & Ganti, L. (2021). Impact of covid-19 on the mental health of US college students. BMC Psychology, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00598-3

Lestari, R., & Setyawan, F. E. (2021). Mental health policy: Protecting community mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Public Health Research, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.4081/jphr.2021.2231

Patrinos, H., & Donnelly, R. (2021). Learning loss during COVID-19: An early systematic review. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-518655/v1

Pfefferbaum, B., & North, C. S. (2020). Mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic. New England Journal of Medicine, 383(6), 510–512. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp2008017

Rogers, T. N., Rogers, C. R., VanSant‐Webb, E., Gu, L. Y., Yan, B., & Qeadan, F. (2020). Racial disparities in Covid‐19 mortality among essential workers in the United States. World Medical & Health Policy, 12(3), 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.358

Saltzman, L. Y., Lesen, A. E., Henry, V., Hansel, T. C., & Bordnick, P. S. (2021). Covid-19 mental health disparities. Health Security, 19(S1). https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2021.0017

Tsamakis, K., Tsiptsios, D., Ouranidis, A., Mueller, C., Schizas, D., Terniotis, C., Nikolakakis, N., Tyros, G., Kympouropoulos, S., Lazaris, A., Spandidos, D., Smyrnis, N., & Rizos, E. (2021). Covid‑19 and its consequences on Mental Health (review). Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine, 21(3). https://doi.org/10.3892/etm.2021.9675

Usher, K., Durkin, J., & Bhullar, N. (2020). The COVID‐19 pandemic and Mental Health Impacts. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 29(3), 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12726

Vigo, D., Patten, S., Pajer, K., Krausz, M., Taylor, S., Rush, B., Raviola, G., Saxena, S., Thornicroft, G., & Yatham, L. N. (2020). Mental health of communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 65(10), 681–687. https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743720926676

Zhai, Y., & Du, X. (2020). Addressing collegiate mental health amid covid-19 pandemic. Psychiatry Research, 288, 113003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113003